Author: Ellen van Aken

Our dedicated (non-Microsoft) software for helping our clients online was just (=before COVID-19) being rolled out with various amounts of success. Some people loved it, and saw the benefits for both client and therapist (no need to travel for both parties, client being in their own environment, connection with the client registration systems), others said they needed the face-to-face meetings to be able to provide real help.

Now that we have had to move all therapy online, we found a functionality gap in the software: the option to use this for group sessions, either multiple therapists seeing one client, or sessions with one therapist and several clients.

After discussing various options we agreed to make Teams temporarily available for this purpose, so our therapists can finalise the existing group therapies, and perhaps even start new ones.

Microsoft Teams is a business tool and meant for collaboration in an organisational context. Mental health therapy is something completely different, so we had to create special instructions:

1. Create the invitation

Create the invitation from Outlook Online, NOT from Teams.

Add the relevant title, attendees, date and time, and message info.

Make sure you make this a Teams meeting.

Before sending, click the “Response Options” top right and select “Hide attendee list”.
Optionally, you can also UNselect “Allow forwarding” to avoid uninvited people getting into your group session.

As soon as you have made a choice, the popup will go away, so it is a good idea to check if you have made the right selections.

Click Send.

Make sure to hide the attendee list, so clients do not see eachother’s email addresses. Also, do not forget to toggle the Teams meeting button!

Alternatively you can add the attendees to the BCC field, but as this field is not visible by default, it means people will have to change their Outlook settings. Using “Hide attendee list” is easier.
Those who use the Outlook desktop (in our case: hardly any therapist has this) can use the BCC field or add the users as a Resource. This is a bit of a weird workaround in my opinion. Just use Outlook Online, it is great!

Now, if the invitation is sent, the attendees will see only their own name in the invitation, which is a privacy requirement in this situation.
If you have also disabled the “Forward invitation” option, this will be displayed on the invitation, depending on the recipient’s email programme.

2. Manage meeting options

By default, everyone can go into the meeting freely, and everyone can present. (Update 15-04-2020: the default is now that externals will have to wait in the lobby. Good idea.) While this is the easiest setting for regular business purposes, it is not always the best option. We have heard about Teams meetings in education, where pupils muted the teacher and/or changed his/her role into attendee or even threw each other out of the meeting altogether!

So, in our situation it may be best to prevent any issues and provide a little more control to the therapist(s). The following can only be done by the person who has organised the meeting.

Open the meeting in your Teams calendar

Click the Meeting Options, to the right of the time zones OR on the bottom of the invitation underneath the link to the meeting. (see the Outlook screenshot below)

I prefer this button to adjust meeting options.

Change the lobby settings to: “People in my organization” (so you can discuss with your colleague before you allow everyone into the meeting)

Change the presenter settings to anything except Everyone. “People in my organization” is a good one.
This will make all others an attendee, and they can only use audio, video and chat. (Roles description by Microsoft)

Click Save.

I suggest the settings above if you have non-presenting external users.

This can also be done from the invitation in Outlook:

At the bottom you will find the meeting options. Please note you are reminded that you have hidden the list of attendees.

3. Change roles during the meeting

During the meeting you can also have some control and change roles.

Click on the people icon in the meeting control bar

You will now see the list of participants. You can now

Mute everyone

As a presenter, you can mute everyone (except yourself) in one go.

You can also manage individual attendees by clicking on the … behind their name

Mute

Make them a presenter (and later an attendee again)

Remove someone from the meeting

Steven Collier has made a nice video where he explains “Teams-bombing” and the prevention thereof (items 2 and 3) with an example of a rebellious student.

4. Avoid “private viewing” of your presentation

If you are sharing a presentation, by default people are allowed to click through at their own pace. While many people will not know where that option is, it may be a good idea to switch that off, especially if your presentation has a carefully designed build-up.

Click the ellipses in the meeting control bar and click “Show device settings”. A panel with camera and microphone settings will pop up, as well as a toggle to change the presentation flip-through option from On to Off.

By default this setting is turned ON (the button will then be green) .

5. End the meeting

If you want to make sure that the conversation stops when the meeting ends, you can “End meeting” which will stop all audio and video. The chat will still be accessible and can still be used.

Just click the … on the meeting bar and click “End Meeting”.

Conclusion

The default settings of Teams may be a little too “flexible” for non-business purposes. Fortunately there are many options to have more control.

Mind you, you as my regular audience will probably know all of this, but our therapists generally know only the basics of Office365 (oh, I need to say Microsoft365 now, right?) and they need detailed instructions, as they have to schedule these sessions themselves.

Next time, I will discuss the user interface for various email programmes. I have had a ton of questions about what clients see and I want to make sure I can answer that properly.

While List.ly is doing their best to get their Vimeo videos displayed properly, I thought I’d share a number of recent finds with you.
Where available, I have added related videos so you do not have 5, but 8 items to look at. In total, this should keep you busy for a little more than 30 minutes! 🙂

The logos are outdated so I guess the video is older than the upload date of February 2020. But as far as I can check in my one-person Delve, the functionality is still correct.

2. Your new intranet (in Portuguese)

Teaser for the upcoming new intranet at Samsonite Brazil. Uploaded March 2020.

3. CM3 SharePoint – your first walkthrough

Quite a long demo of this SharePoint intranet for a USA-based building services organization. This demo starts with the log-on process and it starts to get really interesting from 1.40 onwards, when the homepage is shown. I am fascinated by the colour scheme! It has a lot of useful content and other stuff. In their next video, they look a bit more at the homepage and the SharePoint functionalities and invite you to name the intranet (by completing a Form, of course!).
Uploaded March 2020.

4. Mobile app for real estate organization (builder) – in Dutch

Nice overview of the mobile (SharePoint-based) intranet-app for this Dutch real estate organization. They build houses but also own some DIY-shops in the Netherlands.

This mobile app has a ton of good stuff – News of course, colleague search, employee-stuff. It does not look like the native SharePoint app though.
Uploaded March 2020.

5. SmartSpace SharePoint intranet

Walkthrough of a SharePoint intranet for a software organization with offices in UK and USA. The look and feel is quite basic (just the company logo, not even their corporate colours) compared to the design of their proposal templates and website. They appear to do almost everything “corporate” in one site.
Having your Mission and Vision statement on the landing page must become boring after some time, but they may want to change that over time into News or something used frequently. I really like the fact they have a list of approved software (with details) as well as their project portfolio also in SharePoint lists.
Uploaded March 2020.

We were prepared…

We had updated our instructions for working from home, either with work laptop, work smartphone, private computer or private smartphone, because everyone has to work from home, where possible, until further notice.

We had created and tested instructions for Teams chat, calls, videocalls and online meetings, internally and externally, because of course many meetings would shift to online.

Our support team was ready to take calls and take over people’s laptops from home, our netwerk had been tested, and everyone knew we would have a lot of questions starting Monday.

We are a mental health care organization, and our psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, nurses and care-takers have chosen their jobs because they want to work with people, not with computers. We knew they would have many questions when they suddenly had to do intakes and consulting sessions online, or organize a Teams meeting for their daily handover meeting.
So, we were prepared!

…Or were we?

However, we were not prepared for the lack of digital skills of some of our work force, some of whom did not know how to download an app from the app store, how to open the Office365 start page (it is actually a button in the Start Menu), or that they have to slide their web cam cover open in order to show their face to their colleagues during a videocall 😮

We were also not prepared for the number of people that attempted to download the Teams app, while they have the F1 license (which is for web apps only). But can you blame people that they click the most visible button, especially at times of hurry or digital stress?
We have all voted in User Voice – please vote as well and help us get that “Get the Windows app” off the start page – or at least make it less dominant!

Most of our users can not download the Windows app – they can only use the web app. But that “Get the Windows app” button is so dominant, that everyone clicks it.

And it was a complete surprise to get an overwhelming number of Team site requests. We thought everyone had been informed well enough that a Team site is not a prerequisite for organizing a Teams meeting. But my colleague and I were flooded by requests. Even after filtering out exact requirements we still had to create tons of Team sites (we create them centrally to have at least some control over the names of Groups) and improvised a number of “Team site for owners” and “Team site for members” webinar sessions to quickly show all those new users how Teams can help them get their work done in an effective way.

Some of my colleagues were not prepared to have their whole family at home, as schools have closed as well, and everyone needed a place where they can work or learn.
This resulted in some of my colleagues preferring to do part of their work in the evenings, when children are in bed, the network is used less, and a proper seat and table does not need fighting over. Which led to a meeting in the evening and we will do some webinars in the evening next week, because many colleagues are in the same situation.

On the plus side

Although this is not a fun situation to be in, it has a few advantages:

Suddenly all colleagues had to upgrade their digital skills, whether they wanted or not. We try to help them as much as possible, but it is ultimately up to them. For many of them it turned out to be just a small hurdle and they are becoming regular users now.

Teams (which until now we created very sparingly) is now a standard product for the organization, which means we can move our strategy forward much faster than anticipated.

Our online tools for therapy (non-Microsoft) are being rolled out much faster than anticipated.

All colleagues feel much more “together” now that we have to face this crisis.

It is interesting to see that we can improvise so well when needed.

And me?

For me, the whole situation has not made that much difference yet. Apart from staying at home for at least 23 hours of the day, it has just been a week working from home, like I do normally one day a week. But you may want to ask my husband who suddenly has a wife at home all the time 😉
But who knows how long this will last…and not being able to go outside much or visit family or friends may become rather a strain.

I am still puzzled by all those Team site requests though. The group chat may be a replacement of all the daily talk you do if you are sitting in an office. Well, we are already thinking about doing a survey to see if and how Teams has helped in these “interesting times”…

At the very last “Office365/SharePoint Connect” gathering in Haarlem* I was quite impressed when Rick van Rousselt gave us a demo of Kaizala, sharing his telephone on a large screen.

This may come in useful when we want to provide our colleagues with more information about the Office365 mobile apps. So, I thought I’d write out the steps and practice as I am usually quite clumsy when it comes to connecting devices. 😎

The secret ingredient is…a Teams meeting!

March 2020. As the next weeks will mean “remote working’ for a lot of people, due to the Corona virus, this may also come in useful if you want to demonstrate a cool new app to a colleague, or for helpdesks to support colleagues who have questions about the workings of a smartphone.

A few days before the demo

Make sure you have the Teams app installed on your presentation laptop and your telephone

Schedule a Teams meeting for the time of the demo

Remove any apps on your mobile that you do not want to show – or move them to a separate page – and check if your phone’s background image is suitable for the audience 😉

Create your demo (what do you want to show and which sequence)

Practice sharing your screen on your phone

The day before the demo

Charge your devices (and a powerbank, to be on the safe side)

Remove screen notifications and sounds to avoid disturbance (or embarrassment – you do not want to know what I have seen during all the years I have been working in multi-location organizations 🙄 ) during your demo

Sign in to both Teams apps with the account you want to use for the demonstration

At the time of the demo

Start well before time, if possible

Connect your laptop to the demonstration screen

Mute the sound on both devices to avoid an irritating reverb

Join the meeting on both devices, without microphone and camera

On your mobile, click the … in the meeting bar and select “Share”

Enter a caption

Select “Share screen” (exact words may vary on iOS and Android) and then “Start broadcast”

Dutch again! Click on “Start…” to start broadcast.

Wait until your mobile phone is shown on the screen

Go to the content you want to show (on your mobile) and dazzle your audience!

It is a bit dark but this is my phone (device left), displayed on my laptop (in the middle), while showing SharePoint News.

8. When your demo is over, open the Teams app and click “Stop broadcast”.

To end, click “Stop…”.

Although my (iOS) app tells me that everything is recorded, (it even shows a timer in the red bar on top) it does not mean that a video is created. I guess they mean everything will be shared.

Conclusion

As usual, this is not rocket science, but I thought it might be helpful for myself and for others to share the detailed steps.

Are you ever demonstrating smartphone (apps) to an audience and are you using Teams or something else?

* Office365 and SharePoint Connect, Haarlem/Amsterdam

I am really sad that Office365 and SharePoint Connect will no longer be around, as it was always VERY useful, in a convenient location, well-visited by many people in my network, and not too expensive. Thank you, Nigel and Irene Clapham, for organizing this great event for so many years!

We received an interesting question the other day: “I am sharing a document on my OneDrive with a colleague. Where can I set an Alert to know when she has made edits?”

The Alert option is available on SharePoint, so it feels a bit weird that it is not available on OneDrive. There is a suggestion in User Voice, which has been posted in 2014 (that is 6 years ago!) with the response that it is “in the Plans”. Let’s hit that voting button, folks – it should not be that hard knowing that SharePoint and OneDrive are basically the same thing. Please vote here!

So I had to resort to a few workarounds:

1. Move to SharePoint and set an Alert.

If you are sharing a document or folder for a longer time, and expecting regular edits, you’d better move it to SharePoint. SharePoint is designed for long-term team collaboration and allows you to receive an Alert.
Remember, your OneDrive will be removed when you leave the organization, so do not hoard documents that belong to your team or department!

2. Look at “Shared” and then “Shared by you”

Under “Activity” you can see if, and who, has edited your document, and when this has happened. Sadly you can not sort or filter so you will just have to scroll to find that file. This may be another good reason not to keep a lot of shared documents in your OneDrive forever 🙂

Here you can find if your document has been edited.

3. Make it a habit to add comments with an @mention

This one will need some training for all parties involved, but it is like learning html: you will forever benefit from knowing this 🙂
If you use Comments on the document, and @mention the other person, this person will receive an email that the document has been edited.

Open the document and make the changes

Put your cursor near the change and open the “Review” tab from the ribbon

Click “New comment” and a panel on the right side of the document will open. It already invites you to add a name (you will get suggestions as you type) – it is sufficient to do this in one comment, only.

How commenting looks

When you are done commenting click the arrow button to send the comment

The @-mentioned person will receive an email notifying you of the comment, and you will of course see a more recent change in your “Shared by you” view.
Please note that the person will receive an email for every comment that @mentions them, so doing this once is sufficient!BTW, this only works within your organization as far as I have found.

In the application (Excel in this case) under “Recent” you will see that Mystery Guest has commented.

You can see that a comment has been made (This is Excel web app)

4. Use Power Automate

We have not really rolled out Power Automate throughout the organization yet, so this is just a quick test for myself. I used the recipe “When a file is modified, complete a custom action” and it looks like this:

A basic workflow for testing purposes.

It provides a basic email, that could be improved with the link or more details about the file and the author:

The email

I would suggest to use this sparingly, and only for those folders you share (but then again, why not store them on SharePoint?) or you will get inundated with messages that you have edited a file 🙂

Conclusion:

There are a few options to know if someone else has edited your document. If this is a regular process, please move the document(s) to SharePoint! However, it would be so much easier if Alerts were just standard functionality for OneDrive. So, remember to hit that Vote-button!

Have you received this question as well? How did you respond? Did I miss an option?

As List.ly still has not gotten their act together, please find here another set of intranet promotion videos from Vimeo. Their Help and Community pages have been showing up blank for the past weeks, so I am very afraid that I will have to move my video collection elsewhere – again 😦

1. Landmark Intranet Teaser (SharePoint)

A short teaser for a new intranet set to launch about now. This video does not go beyond the corporate part (news, events, video) but it is always nice to see another SharePoint home page. This is a UK commercial real estate company.
Uploaded February 2020.

2. Backpack

Backpack, what a nice name for an intranet for a series of private schools in the USA! This is a demo – slightly on the long side (5 mins) but it has some nice features, such as the ability to select or suggest apps. Also, the presenters are chatty and relaxed which is nice to listen to.It uses Office365 for document management but not for the intranet pages. Uploaded January 2020.

3. Social Intranet RM IT

Silent demo for the intranet of a Swiss recruitment agency. Nice colours (completely different from their website, and not a company logo in sight) and the usual stuff. I am not so happy with the name “Wiki” for corporate policies (as the word “wiki” suggests to me that documentation is still in the crowdsourcing phase) but I know people will not agree with me 🙂
Uploaded February 2020.

4. Intranet launch Claro (in Spanish)

Upbeat teaser/demo for the intranet of an Argentinian telecommunications company. It looks nice and is accessible on all devices. I could not see that many details.
Uploaded February 2020/

5. Intranet relaunch Ricola (in German)

Very on-brand mockup design. The new intranet for this Swiss herbal sweets manufacturer has workspaces (collaboration spaces to reduce emails and paper), a community for help with the intranet, search function etc.
Uploaded February 2020.

After many years of using the Outlook desktop app at work, I now find myself using the web app more and more. Partly this is because the majority of our workforce only uses the web and mobile apps, so knowing the web app is important to provide support, but partly because it is starting to grow on me.

Why would someone prefer the limited options of Outlook on the web over the full functionality of Outlook desktop?

1. You can select the colour scheme that works for you

In my organization, we allow everyone to select their own theme. After 35 years of corporate multinationals with a “Brand Police” 🙂 it was a bit of a shock to discover that my current employer does not think it is that important to have the same Office365 top bar in our house style colour for everyone. It is the default, but if you prefer something else, that is fine.

This means that everyone can choose what works for them:

a few colleagues have chosen black, “because it is least distracting”

one of my colleagues loved and applied the rainbow unicorn theme at first sight

I change once every few months and usually go for something colourful

many people have never changed their default bar

and everything in between

Seriously, it looks so much nicer and more colourful than that boring grey-and-blue desktop and those cluttered wiry icons! (Yes, I know I can minimize the ribbon)

Desktop. Booooooring! 🙂

Web app. Nice and colourful! BTW, who will I see at Ignite the Tour Amsterdam? 🙂

2. You can visually separate your personal from your group mailbox

We suggest those who have a group mailbox, to select a different theme for their group mailbox than for their own mailbox, so they can easily see in which mailbox they are. You can’t do that in the desktop app!

3. You can “like” an email

This sounded trivial when I first encountered it, but it is actually a nice feature. I frequently see that “like” in my notifications when my colleague has read one of my proposals for a text or something, but also when I have sent someone an answer to their question.

That like is often sufficient. It means people have read it and appreciate it. They do not need to send another email to say that.

Instead of hitting Reply, why not send a “like” if that is all you want to say?

4. It supports charms and coloured emoji

Again, very trivial but it is a nice touch.
The charms are added automatically to an event when you add a certain word in the title-field. They display on your agenda in the web app, but not in the desktop app.

You can also add a charm after creating the event. Just rightclick on the event in your agenda and select “Charm” from the menu.

If you like to add a charm (icon) to your event you can do so – in the web app only.

And, as mentioned in an earlier post, you can use coloured emoji in folder names or other texts of the web app, but they are displayed in black-and-white in the desktop app.

5. You can pin an email to the top

This is very useful if you want to keep an email top of mind – and top of inbox. For instance, I have an email with directions and participants, for when I give a training in a few weeks. I do not want to have to search for it – and I can easily delete it after the event.

Just hit that pin to keep it on top of your mail.

I am sure that Outlook has a Quick Action or so to keep track of these emails, but pinning them to the top is very easy!

6. Easy interface

In the web app, if any action or setting is not on the page itself, it is in the Outlook settings. Simple!

In the desktop app actions can be on different tabs on the ribbon, or sometimes they are hidden and need to be added to the ribbon first.
And for settings, there’s the File tab which gives you a number of buttons and a gazillion tabs and options under the button “Options”. Pfff, complicated!

Yes, you can do much more with Outlook desktop, so the extra complexity is understandable, but until now I have not missed anything while working with the web app. I do not feel a big need to use Voting buttons (I would use Forms!) or to delay sending an email or…

7. Sweep

Sweep is a neat way to clean up. Per sender you can determine where to move their mails and when. I use this to delete newsletters and RSS-feeds after 10 days. If I have not read them by then, I never will and now I can rest assured they will not pile up.

Sweep is in fact a limited form of Rules. You can create a Rule (in both apps) that does the same. But Sweep is just there, readily configured!

You will find Sweep on the top bar. This is the setting I use for newsletters and RSS-feeds.

8. Three options to change a recurring meeting

This has been a life-saver for some of our secretaries. If you want to edit a recurring meeting, there’s always the question: do I change this for all instances, including those from the past, or do I stop the meeting and create another?

In the desktop app, you can only change one meeting or the whole series – changing the series means you are also changing the history.

In Outlook on the web you have the additional option to change “This event and all following events”. This means you can keep your history intact and just make changes to future events. So, if you are an Outlook desktop user but want to change only events in the future, switch to the web version and make the change there!

You have more options, including only making changes to future events.

9. See all email attachments on one page

The Files link. Hello!

Not sure if this is widely available yet, but bottom left you will now see a little paperclip. If you click it, you will see all attachments from emails on one page, allowing you to quickly find that one document of photo without having to go through each email. You can filter the results on file type and date, and you can preview, download or email each document by clicking the ellipses to the right of the file name.

You can toggle between photos and files, but also filter on file type and time range.

10. RSVP to a meeting request without opening the email

In Outlook web app, invitations show an RSVP-button in the title field. It also shows immediately if there is a conflict. You can accept or decline from the inbox interface, without opening the full email. BTW, this is also available in the mobile app – really nice!

Outlook shows your availability, and if you click RSVP you get a popup with response options.

11. Nobody blogs about it 😁

A blogger needs to find a niche! I search the internet frequently for answering user questions or issues, and it is really hard to find stuff about the web version as the desktop app is featured all the time. Many bloggers who write about Outlook write about the desktop version exclusively.

So, I have decided to include some more Outlook web app stuff for all those organizations where people are not desk-bound. But I would be happy if someone could point me to another blogger who writes about this topic.

12. Just in case 🙂

Originally this was titled “10 reasons”, then I found two new ones, so I think it is a safe bet to save one item for anything new that pops up!

Conclusion

Outlook on the web is, in my humble opinion, much more visually appealing and easier to work with than the desktop version. It even has a few cool options that the desktop does not have! It may have “limited functionality” but for someone who is not a heavy user, it works perfectly.

Do you prefer the web version as well? Any option I forgot to mention? Or are you enamoured of the desktop?